New data on West Oakland’s air quality
My organization (West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project) just released a new StoryMap that shows how West Oakland’s air quality is changing.
West Oakland is a historically overpolluted neighborhood because of truck traffic, freeway pollution, and heavy industry. It's textbook environmental racism. This StoryMap is the culmination of eighteen months of air monitoring by West Oakland residents and researchers, and it shows a lot of interesting stuff:
- West Oakland’s air is getting cleaner. Our air monitoring found that black carbon (AKA soot, a dangerous pollutant that comes from combusting diesel) dropped by 46% on average since 2017. That improvement is because of a combination of community advocacy and statewide environmental regulations from the California Air Resources Board.
- We found a heavy metals hotspot at 28th and Union. All the heavy metals we found were below the threshold at which they become hazardous to human health, but this is still concerning, especially with schools, homes, and daycares nearby. Our measurements can’t tell us exactly where the heavy metals are coming from, but this monitor was right by the local recycling facility CASS, as well as several truck yards and small metal fabricators.
- Diesel particulate matter emissions from the Port of Oakland are projected to increase slightly by 2029. This is taking us in the wrong direction. The Port is West Oakland’s biggest polluter, and they’re doing a lot of work to decarbonize, but emissions are still projected to rise slightly because of overall growth.
There’s a lot more to see on the map: it gets into West Oakland’s biggest pollution sources, historic vs. current levels of pollutants, and more. We wanted to create something that was useful to people with no scientific background, community advocates, data nerds, policy wonks, and everybody in between, so check it out and let us know how we did.